Are victims of sexual molestation promiscuous? The answer is yes, and also no. One out of four females experiences sexual abuse by the time she reaches eighteen, and that includes only reported cases.{99} We’ve known for a long time that sexual abuse is related to higher rates of depression, anxiety, increased sexual inappropriateness, drug use, and alcohol, but more recently, researchers have looked more closely at these findings and discovered that there is a distinction between those who pursue sex after the abuse and those who avoid it.{100} Some victims use indiscriminate sexual behavior to cope with the pain, others have learned that saying no doesn’t matter, and others develop sexual interest too early in a manner that ultimately confuses them. Characteristics of the person who was victimized also affect whether that person becomes sexually precocious or whether she avoids sex altogether, both as ways of coping with the abuse. But family support helps protect against promiscuity among those who’ve been sexually abused. (Interestingly, family context had less effect on those who didn’t report a history of abuse.) Studies have shown that when mothers believed their daughters and took proactive measures to help protect them, girls tended to experience less negative effects.
One of the more interesting findings is that sexual abuse victims are more likely to use drugs and alcohol in relation to their sexual activity,{101} surely as a way to cope with the sexual experiences, which also might explain their increased likelihood of multiple partners.
Lena was raped during her first week at college in her dorm. She was drunk and underage, so she was too terrified to report it. Soon after, she fell into a depression and experienced enough suicidal ideation that she had to leave school. Her mother, desperate and at a loss, found her a psychologist with whom she spoke for the first time about being molested as a child by her youth pastor. It had gone on for two years, and the worst part for her was that she had liked it. She realized through her counseling sessions that she drank so she could have intimacy with people. Otherwise, the shame she felt was too powerful. And that the depression she experienced was from shoving that shame far down.
As we’ve seen, shame controls so much of girls’ sexual lives, from losing their virginity to being raped. It is the common denominator that interferes with healing and recovery, and the one that holds girls away from a sense of their own sexual identity.
Rapidly increasing technology keeps providing more opportunities for sexual behavior among and violation of girls. In the next chapter, we examine what happens to girls’ sexual identities online.
Chapter 8
BRAVE NEW WORLD
The Loose Girl Online
I have a Pavlov’s dog–reaction to the sound of a text coming in. I immediately think, “Could it be someone who wants me?”
Fifteen-year-old Johanna sends text after dirty text to boys. She has never actually had sex with a boy, but she knows the language that goes along with it. She tells boys what she wants to do to them, and she tells them what she wants them to do with her. Her favorite part is how the boys always beg her to say more. In real life, boys don’t give her that sort of attention, so she loves it. It is the one time she feels sexy and powerful.
On a regular night, she has about five boys she “sexts” with. A couple of times she has sent pictures of her breasts, and once she sent a photo of her entire naked body. She knows full well that pictures can really get you in trouble, though, because a friend of hers sent a photo to her boyfriend, and he proceeded to send it to half their grade’s boys. Recently, she’s also begun having cybersex: she goes online to a chat room to talk dirty with a random user. She loves the power, loves the sense that boys want her. Like many girls, she learned about cybersex at a slumber party. One of the girls knew of it—perhaps from an older sibling—so they found a site online, made up a character, and tried things out. They shrieked when they obtained the interest of someone and then collapsed in hysterics on the ground every time they came up with something new to say. But Johanna remembered that party a year later when she felt unwanted and ugly and had developed crushes that were never reciprocated, so she went back to the same site and got a rush from the power that came with having a random stranger want her, even if the random stranger could easily have been another teenage girl. Like role-playing in video games, cybersex is a way to try on a persona who girls can’t be in real life, not without serious repercussions.
Johanna is part of the 39 percent of teenagers who have sent racy messages via text and part of the 20 percent who has sent nude photos.{102} The largely held assumption is that our teenagers are in a whole new world when it comes to sex, and regarding technology, that is absolutely true. The current generation is the first one to have so much immediate technology at their fingertips. Flirting looks different now. Bullying and rumors have a new weapon.
Parents and school officials are scared, and our often frantic concern about kids being exposed too early to sex through technology makes some sense. According to Child Trends Databank, the proportion of children with home access to computers has steadily increased to more than 90 percent as of 2009, and 93 percent use the Internet. According to a 2009 survey of eight- to eighteen-yearolds, 36 percent had a computer in their bedroom, and 71 percent of them also had a television in their bedroom.{103} We know that porn is readily available to most Web viewers. One need only click the button that says “yes” to the question that reads, “Are you 18 years or older?”
As part of this fear, a number of states have criminalized the sending and sharing of nude photos, like the ones Johanna sends, hitting teenagers with child pornography and sex offender charges. As of this writing, at least twelve states have introduced legislation to prohibit or deter sexting. State laws range from minor dings on a juvenile record to child pornography convictions. Each state controls the severity of its laws about sexting, and school officials and parents of girls who’ve had their pictures distributed bring the most charges.{104} The question is, What really happens to girls who use this sort of technology?
Media concerns itself, of course, with the sensationalized, fear-inducing stories, such as the one about Jesse Logan, the eighteen-year-old Ohio girl who hung herself after a nude photo of her had been disseminated throughout her school. The tragic story quickly segued into one about the necessity of criminalizing the kids who dispersed the photo and about holding the schools accountable. In a Today show interview with Jesse’s mother and the Internet expert Parry Aftab, Aftab noted that we need to enforce these laws “in order to keep our children alive.”{105}
Hope Witsell, a thirteen-year-old in Florida, killed herself after a topless photo of her was sent around her high school and the high school in a neighboring town. She sent the photo after pressure to do so from a boy she had a crush on.{106} Really, though, the harm didn’t originate with the sexting, which is how Witsell’s and Logan’s cases were presented. It came from the girls’ peers, who bullied them. The photos were just tools of a much greater harm, which is rarely addressed as seriously: slut shaming.